New work policy which promotes backstabbing your peers?

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Hi! We've just had a new work policy handed to us, and unless I'm mistaken/paranoid, it's intended to make things even more cutthroat.

People's raises are going to be based solely on performance. Sounds reasonable. However, there's a catch. There's a "curve", and the new policy is that you will be shown where you are on the curve. Out of every 20 employees, there will be one D, nine C's, eight B's, and one A. The higher your grade, the higher your salary will be. There are two things we'll be graded on: performance and growth. And when you're dealing with AS and you have a growth asymptote...

Am I imagining something here, or is this going to force everyone to start competing/backstabbing each other for their raises? If there's only one big raise for every 20 employees things can get nasty -- you can have 20 very good employees where only one of them will get the big raise!

Is this a common workplace tactic? It's depressing -- work already has low enough morale.

Thanks in advance,

ACG

I found that the high grades went to the staff that were best at brown nosing, pleasing their superiors, big noting themselves / self aggrandizement and doing what they were told without complaint. I was good at none of these things and while I did my job very well and customers loved me, I consistently scored low grades in reviews.

Backstabbing fellow staff members by bitching about them, no matter where they sat in the hierarchy was generally frowned upon. I think you were supposed to be able to resolve your problems directly without going to management. It wasn't something I did much. I prefered to let management find out on their own if someone was no good. However that didn't stop some of my bosses from badmouthing me when it came to pay reviews. I tended to make their jobs a bit hard by expecting things to be "done right" too often and being a little "too honest for my own good" ie I resented being told to say I had a year's experience doing something I had one week's training in.

One person who did the most thorough job of bad mouthing me, getting me transferred (against her bosses wishes), and stopping my pay increase for that year, got sacked about three months later for being an absolutely crap manager. Unfortunately what she did to me was not undone.

This type of managerial strategy can best be summed up with the phrase "I know, let's you and him fight!". It is a classic divide and rule tactic which is designed to manipulate people through fear.

This type of practice will really take off because if workers and their peers combined forces, ie joined together instead of being manipulated into fighting against each other, then their will could prevail against the bosses and supervisors.

I can't advise you on what to do in your situation, but from what I have learned over 40 years, the best strategy would be to steer as wide a berth between yourself and your 'colleagues' as is possible.

This kind of grading arrangement is designed to pitch people against each other and to create fear. If at all possible, it might make sense to lower productivity by half a per cent below each pay cut you get inflicted on you.

Pointless, ennarvating work sucks, which is why such brutal violence has to be deployed in the workplace, to keep everyone afraid and 'respectful'.

I can't do that -- my manager has already told me that I am too aloof. "Be more friendly! Say hi to everyone!". What's more, we're on this huge collaborative project which all of us detest. I even tried to be transferred out and the other group wouldn't take me (and didn't say why). In a classic worst-case scenario, they outsourced everything I'm good at to India and replaced it with an endless collaborative high level design project with no end in sight. It's also widely believed that the manager is a jerk, thinking only for himself and caring nothing about the people under him. This policy is company-wide, though.

Then I'll have to worry about getting laid off. I can't do that. Besides, I always work at the same speed/same way. I feel like I'm pushing myself really hard to make it through this project, and they often say I'm not doing enough. I get the impression that fear of coworkers and interaction with the coworkers is preventing me from doing my job to the best of my abilities. I also would find it relatively uncomfortable deliberately reducing my productivity on work ethical reasons.

I wouldn't be surprised if I'm like that too. I've always felt like I serve the company, not the manager. As an experiment, I brought jigsaw puzzles to work after seeing another group use them to defuse tension and increase camaraderie around the groups. My manager didn't care ("I'm not going to tell you whether it's right or wrong."). But the other members of the group found it helped them relax. I may be too unorthodox for this 60+ year old geezer.

We don't get to review our managers. But the truth is, he gets the job done. I may not like him at all, but realistically all I can measure him on is performance. His coworkers aren't happy, but the "slaves" do produce...

ACG

Smart companies dont do that. Find a new job.

Wow, this is actually where the roots of Marxism lie. Karl Marx's theory believed that the proletariat class (the workers, who own the labor) can unite and rise up against the ruling class (the supervisors, who own the capital).

Ilikedragons is correct.

Having a set number of available grades is very wrong. Let's say there can be only one "A" but you you 3 or 4 A-quality employees. Now how do you decide who gets it? Pick your favorite! Suddenly it is no longer about performance.

Don't get the wrong idea . . . I think people should be compensated for high performance. What I don't like situations like this grading curve that arbitrarially assigns only one top performer. The company is just cheap-ass and not wanting to give out raises.

What performance metrics do they use to gauge it? If they do indeed have a quantifiable performance metric, they should use a continuous pay raise gradient. That would be most fair. But I guess they're not about being fair.

There's nothing new about that, especially at the workplace.

It's a relative performance assessment, and there are two ways of getting better than someone else, either improving your own performance, or sabotaging the other, either just in the assessment, or for real. You can bet anything you like that both will be going on. Management must be hoping that the first will have a greater effect than the second. Not surprising, seeing that this is probably how most of them got into their positions. I wouldn't want to bet on the long term success of that policy.

See! Every time I turn around, I always see people complaining about the policies presented by the current economic system. Still, I see it with people who actually support the system in the first place. That doesn't make a whole lot of sense, and what this policy stipulates arises out of competition. You have forty workers, so how do you pick who you are going to promote? Only a few out of all can be that good and worthy of promotion. Companies can't give raises to all, which would make them act more like unions, so they need to find a way to give promotions to the few. Companies do this all the time upon the stock market. Most companies will strive to be number one, and so you have a few at the top continuously bullying one another to get there. Therefore, it is not at all surprising that they try to push this on to the workers to find out who gets raises and promotions.

- Ray M -

Successful business owners are more like reverse Marxists. Corporations are authoritarian socialist institutions, firmly employing a pyramidal hierarchy with one owner at the top and tier managers in between. All of the workers are at the bottom. An organization has to employ some sort of mechanism such that these tier managers can be picked. Since financial resources are typically always skewed towards the top owners, so raises have to be micro-managed.

Legally, corporations are considered typically immortal persons. If a corporation, as a person, were to be seek out a diagnosis, it most likely would be antisocial personality disorder. The operations of a corporation fit all the criteria. Think about it.

- Ray M -

Actually, I saw a programme about applying DSM-IV-TR Criteria to a Corporate Entity as though it were a Person, and the diagnosis they came up with was NPD or Narcissistic Personality Disorder.